On the Oxford Handbook of Qurʾanic Studies

I’ll confess up front that I didn’t read all of these essays. I read mostly the epistemological and historiographical ones, the essays on Islamic origins and the construction of the Qur’an as a single text, and most of the essays on Qur’anic themes, while largely dodging the extensive chapters on commentary (tafsir). It’s fairly readable, in contrast to the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, which is much denser and presupposes a knowledge of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic philosophy (which makes sense, since many early Islamic thinkers turned to those traditions for tools to understand God). It’s also comprehensive, with a huge amount covered. I was especially interested in the debates over epistemology and Islamic origins, though the arguments there push against the Islamic tradition, and I’d be curious to hear how traditionalist scholars respond, beyond the Qur’an’s reference to itself as the literal word of God. Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s English version of the Qur’an does some of that work, though it’s very much a first-encounter sort of text — and I haven’t read its commentary, since my Kindle won’t allow it.